Topic: The ESA Says Old Games Hacking Is Illegal

Here's the articles of what ESA plans to do to old games.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/04/09/esa-says-preserving-ol...

I am dead serious here! Granted, I'm not from US but this is serious crap here if old games are permanently gone. Imagine if you want to play an old game only to realize that you can't get it anymore and the only way to do that is to wish for a remake or an instant port.

If this works, then I'm pretty positive that we'll be seeing ourselves another crash and Nintendo may not be the one to save the Industry this time......

Buying old games has nothing to do with this.

Yeah it seems like the only point is that hacking consoles/games to be able to play old games is illegal. The IGN headline is really out of context and only a clickbait.

Journalism at its finest. Btw, you may want to change the title of the thread to emphasize hacking, not preserving.

It means you won't be able to to play games you bought which have online DRM(always online connection required) anymore after the servers are shutdown by the publisher. Preventing this will lock you out of your own games. That would be bad, though games shouldn't have DRM anyway.

Sometimes, PC games are also hacked to make them work with newer operating systems, to add extra content after the publsiher abadoned the game, or to have online multiplayer after the publisher shut down their servers. This would probably also become illegal, and that would be a terrible thing too.

...any time now, @artwark...

EDIT: Just looked through this article, and it's a bais summary of a report from a clearly baised source. This is one of those things that will have to be settled in some court, and they're likely trying to rally support for their exemption before things really get underway...

yeah, don't read IGN.

if you want to play the games you love, don't sell them.

Still can't trust IGN, but at least they aren't Polygon.

Wait I've seen this everywhere. People were saying that this could lead to shut downs of video game museums and such? Is that true because i'm really confused on this. And as a person pursing an history major I would hate for old video games being lost and not preserved.

It could lead to the shut down of that one huge DOS game website, since it's not simply "preserving" those games, it's making them available to the public at no cost. Which would be good, because that was blatantly just a publicly funded Piracy ring. There's no reason they should get away with that. The real problem is how are they going to be taken down? Will there be a law change? Will governments the world over start actively trying to stamp out piracy sites, and what will constitute piracy. It's going to be a tricky situation, but one that's largely up to the lawyers and government officials, as well as the sites involved.

EDIT: It could lead to other things as well, but it's hard for me to say what since I haven't found any other source outside of that one blogpost from EFF that IGN is referencing.

Uh, okay?

?

I was replying to the op

I mean I think that companies show let the public emulate some old NES or atari etc. games for free because some of these companies dont even touch those old IPs anymore. I understand if a company like nintendo doesn't want their old games free because of the VC but alot of these other companies forgot about these games. I would love to see a Video Game library. I dont know, I might just sound crazy.

I feel like adding some sort of entry fee could be all it would require to make that part of the issue go away. Last I checked, the games were donated to the project, though I'm not exactly sure who was donating...